time

Wednesday and time

Standard

And here we are at Wednesday. Good old Wednesday.

Middle of the week Wednesday.

Got a quarter cup of coffee left and it’s lukewarm, so I don’t think I’m winning the day, not yet, and not by a long shot. I should reheat it.

It’s pretty out, though, it even looks like Fall through the window, you can nearly see the crispness of the air. Nearly.

I can’t believe we’re already in the deep end of October, the year streaming past in a weird, disturbing blur. And yet each day feels like weeks. I don’t know what they did with those quantum entanglement experiments, but they should really cut it out.

Time is finicky enough. There’s no need to poke it.

As the year tumbles toward its finish, it’s been a strange one. We’ve learned a lot about humanity I wish I never knew, about cruelty, about avarice. Maybe we can use that quantum entanglement for good, set the clocks back a bit.

Speaking of, when is that? That should be soon, right?

No big insights today, not on this Wednesday. Just me, my now less-than lukewarm coffee and time.

Like my political side? Read my opinion pieces here.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

 

Advertisement

Time, the past and Shakespeare.

Standard
forced perspective photography of cars running on road below smartphone

Photo by Matheus Bertelli on Pexels.com

I’ve been going through old stuff at my parents’ house, and it really makes you think about the past and our connection to it. The past can feel much like dream; like something that never really happened, but then you find a concrete reminder that it really was.

Shakespeare’s soliloquy from MacBeth automatically springs to mind:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time…

Of course, it then goes into the dark mortality stuff, but I can’t help but think about all those petty-paced “tomorrows” piling up during Shakespeare’s life, and then after, and all the way along until now. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the world spins and on it goes.

There are many schools of thought in which there is only now, only the moment we’re currently experiencing. No future, no past, only now. And in some ways, that must be the absolute truth, as time as we use it is a construct. A day here isn’t a day on Mars; a year here isn’t a year for Saturn.

But time is also a dimension; a marker of where something is. My phone is next to me on the sofa right now, but it wasn’t there yesterday. If we could look into yesterday as we can look up and down and right and left, we wouldn’t see my phone.

Should have warned you I was deeply philosophical today.

Whatever time is, it’s going, and I have other things to do. Happy Tuesday.

Like my political side? Read my opinion pieces here.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

Time for Monday Musings

Standard

Sometimes I feel outside of time, like I’ve lost track of the order. Me and Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s unstuck in time protagonist from Slaughterhouse Five.

“That’s already happened,” I tell myself, “that hasn’t happened yet,” when I feel an ominous rush of prescience.

Time is liquid yet totally rigid, deceptive any way you look at it. And perhaps these thoughts are the ones that arise after a raft of dark, gloomy soggy days, cozy for a while until you get too thinky.

Perhaps.

For me, time is one of those things that I’ll never totally understand, one of those concepts that rules our lives and yet is meaningless in many ways.

And meaningful in others. The past, once past, might as well be solidly behind glass, sometimes mottled, sometimes warped, but you can see it there, see it, but can’t touch it.

In front, a vast emptiness that springs into being as you enter it, one walkway stone by one walkway stone. From something to nothing; no wonder so many people choose to live in the past, already seen, already known. But not quite reachable.

And such are my thoughts on a wet Monday morning when I haven’t even had my coffee yet.

Like my political side? Read my opinion pieces here.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

 

Stop Making It Weird, Time.

Standard

By Joost J. Bakker from IJmuiden [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

These days, a week feels like it lasts six months. Must have to do with the time distortion that got us to this alternative timeline. Maybe it really is six months in old-timey time.

How would we know?

After an exhausting day of technical difficulties, including a DVR that didn’t record a show apparently simply because it didn’t feel like it, I’ve arrived at Friday, probably worse for the wear.

Probably. Who can tell these days? Seriously. Who.

So here we are, the back end of a week of lower where you just don’t want to contemplate what “lowest” might mean. These days are strange days.

I have no words of wisdom for you today. No pithiness, and you know how I love pithiness. We’ve watched the unthinkable become routine, rinse and repeat, ever spiraling down.Yet the days flip through the week like an alarm clock with little boards.

And here we still are.

For now.

For more on my thoughts about Charlottesville and rising bigotry, please read An Open Letter to My Friends of Color.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

End of Days Over Easy

Standard

By David Revoy / Blender Foundation (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

If these were ancient days, we’d be expecting the end of the world. Actually, let’s back up. Even now in the 21st century it kinda looks like the end of the world.

Hurricanes and earthquakes and mudslides and fires. Entire islands decimated, formerly lush green paradises now without a speck of green. And let’s not forget, this terrible streak started with an eclipse and, here in Chicago, a corpse flower.

So if we were superstitiously-minded, or fundamentally religiously-minded, we might take all of these events, piled on top of a regime terrifying in both its ineptitude and cruelty, as a sign.

But some of us are science-fictionally-minded. And we take it as proof-positive that someone’s been messing with time and time is not happy about it.

Not happy at all.

I’ve written about time before, in the seldom-loved but extremely long-titled The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management. The thing is I didn’t think it would become a manual of any kind.

After much research into a topic that is far more complicated and impossible to understand than you might think, I realized one truth: Time does not like being messed with. Not at all.

And we’re seeing that now.

Do I really think that someone got a time machine and stepped on a gum wrapper meant for someone else thus unraveling life us we know it?

Nope. But that’s a pretty good concept, I think.

I guess my point is that we have to process what is happening in the world right now whatever way we can. For me, imagining nefarious science-fiction underpinnings makes it just a hair more tolerable.

But hey, fantasy may be your genre. In that case, I’d blame the dragons.

It’s always the dragons.

For more on my thoughts about Charlottesville and rising bigotry, please read An Open Letter to My Friends of Color.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

In with a Solar Eclipse, Out with a Hurricane

Standard

Thumbnail for version as of 23:39, 18 July 2005So this week came in with a solar eclipse and out with a hurricane. If you don’t think the universe is talking, and talking loudly, it’s probably time get the fingers out of your ears and stop saying “La la la.”

Probably.

I can definitely tell you, if these times were Biblical, there’d be someone chiseling furiously away in stone. We’re not just talking omens, we’re talking the omeniest.

I’ll give you one guess as to why. Come on, you only need the one.

It feels as though everything is wrong, as though this isn’t remotely how things are meant to be, and if this was a movie–as it seems many days–not only would no one believe the eclipse and hurricane so close to one another, it would be around now that the time traveler would show up to try to set things right.

After probably messing up the first time. Which would explain how we got here in the first place.

So as we head into the weekend, if you’re in the path of Hurricane Harvey, please stay safe. And everyone: don’t step on any bugs, and be kind to strangers.

The future may depend upon it.

For more on my thoughts about Charlottesville and rising bigotry, please read An Open Letter to My Friends of Color.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

 

 

Bit of a Trip Break for a Little Musing

Standard

img_5588I’m taking a bit of a travel-blog break, as lovely as it is reliving the magic of my trip, but it’s also extremely time-consuming writing the posts and choosing the photos. Here’s a picture of a frigate bird, though, just because.

Did I mention I took A LOT of photos?

I’m also about to run out of hosting space here, so that’s another issue I need to work through before I move on to the bulk of my photos in the Galapagos. So much sorting to do!

I’ve been home for a week now, the technicolor reality of my vibrant trip subdued, muted by the imposition of reality. It’s almost impossible to believe, sitting on my sofa with the crisp autumn breeze through the window, that those few days ago I stood near the equator and saw a sea lion beg for fish in the fish market.

Don’t worry. I’ve got photos.

It’s funny how the past firmly becomes the past, no matter how you try to stall it. Time and humans; humans and time; one of us has the upper hand.

And it ain’t us.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for something that was so recent? I’m not sure. All I know is I’m looking ahead to our third show this Saturday, and whatever may come beyond.

In or near Chicago in October? Come see “Me Inside Me Presents: Witch, Please,” on October 1, 8, 22 and 29 at Donny’s Skybox Theater at 7 pm. Tickets available at SecondCity.com.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

 Sign up for my spamless newsletter!

 

 

Time to Get this Year in Gear

Standard

Hi there. Here we are, the start of the year, and the real start, not the days-that-are-still-vacation-days-days. The fifth of January. Can’t pretend it’s not real work time now, can we?

Even so, the fresh slate of a new year — not yet marked up by things we meant to do and didn’t, things we should have done but didn’t, and things we never should have done but did — is irresistible. Let’s think about it. From right here, in these early days of January, it’s all possible.

Usually some time around mid-February, the weight of reality tends to start pressing down, which is a heavy responsibility for such a short month, but we’re not there yet, are we? Nope, we’re here, the future year spread in front of us like a blanket of untouched, pristine snow.

Here’s the thing though. That snow is always going to have footsteps. Always. If it’s not the people tramping through in their boots, it’s the animals, the birds lightly scratching the surface; the larger four-legged creatures poking holes down into the drift.  The landscape cannot stay pure, it cannot stay unmarked, because an unmarked landscape is an empty landscape.

So let’s not see the beauty of this year for the temporary state that, by its nature, will fade. Let’s see it for what it will be: trodden and soggy, worn in and used up. Isn’t that what time is for?

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which will be available on January 7, 2015.

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Remember the Point

Standard

As I sat down to write a blog post about, well, writing, I thought about the posts I’ve read about writing, and I thought about all tweets I’ve read about writing, and I came to one conclusion. We writers definitely talk about writing a lot. Like constantly. As though it was an obsession or something.

But then I wondered: how much are we actually writing?

I’m including editing in the scope of the writing process, partially because that’s where I am right now, and partially because you don’t have anything worth reading without editing. So how much are we doing?

When we’re blogging, we could be writing, although if you blog what you write, (hmm, that sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? But you know what I mean), if you blog the fruit of your labors, then you’re ahead of the game. When we’re tweeting, we could be writing. When we’re breathing, we could be writing.

There is the stuff around the writing and the writing itself. It’s so easy to get caught up in the stuff, but it grows and it multiplies until you can’t see the writing for all the stuff.

Remember the writing. That’s what it’s all for. The stuff should be the extra, not the main event, I say blithely as I finish off another blog post.

I’m going, I’m going.

Have a minute? Watch this video.

Rather read? Check out  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only) .

 Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

 

Writing Productivity is a Process

Standard

A quick reminder about the contest. It ends Friday, so enter now for your shot at a $25 Amazon gift card.

So summer came and went, and I find I haven’t gotten as much done as I would have liked. I’m still editing, I haven’t finished my first draft of the manuscript I’m working on, and I’m not quite sure where, exactly, the time has gone.

I did deal with challenges this summer, mostly in the form of unbelievable noise, the kind that takes up cozy residence inside of your skull, and no doubt that impacted my ability to focus. Still, I can’t help but feel that the track and I have parted ways.

But that’s the beauty of this kind of work. Forward progress–any forward progress–is still progress. Sometimes sideways progress is progress too, because once in a while, sideways is just the direction to get you where you’re going.

Is it rationalization? Perhaps, but if you don’t give yourself credit for the small things, it’s easy to get lost in the huge and looming picture. Step by step is the only way to get anywhere, and it’s OK if it takes a while to get to the next one now and then.

Productivity is a process. It doesn’t always operate at maximum efficiency, and that’s OK too.

Have a minute? Watch this video.

Rather read? Check out  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only) .

 Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!